American Graffiti at 50: a classic hangout comedy with a surprising melancholy

Ninety-nine times out of 100, the postscripts that get tucked in before the closing credits, telling us where the characters’ lives have gone from there, are totally unnecessary, especially in a fictional story where their fates are better left to the viewer’s imagination. But in George Lucas’s American Graffiti, which turns 50 this week, they are the most important part of the film, not least because two of the four characters don’t have much longer to live. We can feel that darkness lingering around the edges of Lucas’s dusk-till-dawn nostalgia piece about the last night of summer vacation in 1962 Modesto, California, even while its teenagers are getting into mostly light-hearted forms of trouble. This night has to end, and when the sun comes up, their entire world turns back into a pumpkin.

From the opening shot of Mel’s Drive-In, set to Bill Haley and His Comets’ Rock Around the Clock, American Graffiti seems to unfold inside a snow globe, an idealized past with invisible borders that separate it not only from the outside world, but from the future itself. It’s one of those films, like its spiritual successor Dazed and Confused, that has the quality of a hangout comedy, loose-limbed and goofily episodic, but laced with an air of melancholy that’s so subtle you miss it entirely. (That’s why the postscript is such a slap in the face.) It aches for a scene that had passed just a decade earlier, before the tumult of the Vietnam war and counter-culture, but must have seemed, even then, like ancient history.

Lucas remembers it vividly. Or, perhaps more precisely, he makes his memories vivid, as if he’s cramming every hilarious or meaningful anecdote he can recall into the space of 12 hours or so. In his Modesto, cruising culture is still alive and all the radios are tuned into Wolfman Jack, whose prerecorded musings break up an astonishing hit parade of rock and roll singles that come one after the other. (The soundtrack, which went triple-platinum on the album charts, took up four sides and 97 minutes, only 15 minutes shorter than the film’s running time.) That the year 1962 seems a little late for a setting that so strongly suggests the 50s only adds to the poignancy of the situation. When the night is over, dawn will break on a different town.

In a sense, American Graffiti is a cheerier version of Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show two years earlier, both films about teenagers poised to graduate into uncertainty, choosing between a future that terrifies them and a home that’s changing beneath their feet. For high school graduates Curt Henderson (Richard Dreyfuss) and Steve Bolander (Ron Howard), this is the last night of summer vacation before they travel east to college and they’re awake for every moment of it. Of the two, Steve seems the most eager to leave, having bequeathed his 1958 Chevy Impala to his nerdy, excitable buddy Terry “the Toad” Fields (Charles Martin Smith) and hit pause on his longstanding relationship with his prim girlfriend Laurie (Cindy Williams). But Curt suddenly has cold feet about going away and spends most of the night chasing a mysterious blonde who eyed him from the back of a Ford Thunderbird.

As for Curt and Steve’s friends, it’s more or less another night cruising in Modesto, because they’re not going anywhere. The exciting news for Terry is that taking care of Steve’s car gives him a significant upgrade on his sad little Vespa and he puts his new babe magnet to use immediately. He manages to pick up Debbie (Candy Clark) and attempts to reinvent himself as someone impressive enough to buy cheap liquor without an ID. Meanwhile, the older townie John Milner (Paul Le Mat) peacocks around in his souped-up, canary yellow 1932 Ford Standard Coupe, but he winds up getting stuck with Carol (Mackenzie Phillips), a sassy 12-year-old who refuses to leave the passenger seat.

For a director whose knack for storytelling and mythology would open up the Star Wars universe a few years later, Lucas does everything he can to keep American Graffiti feeling as a loose and spontaneous as possible, as if all four characters are riding by the seat of their pants. And save for Milner, who was the “I get older, they stay the same age” archetype long before Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused, they’re approaching this night with the certain urgency, knowing that it’s the last of its kind. Steve and Laurie break up and get back together multiple times, Curt gets himself initiated in a gang called “the Pharaohs” and poor Terry gets the car stolen when trying to get lucky with Debbie. The chaos somehow ends with Milner squaring off against a cocky stranger (a then unknown Harrison Ford) in a drag race with Laurie riding shotgun.

That break-of-dawn drag race is the only time that any of these hijinks lead to real danger, but it’s fitting that it comes at the end of the film, which is more unsettling than bittersweet. American Graffiti would influence many coming-of-age films to follow – Dazed and Confused and Diner most prominently – and they’re all notable for the melancholy that clouds the action, slightly complicating the fun, nostalgic tone that make them such an alluring hang. Lucas seems as anxious to hold on to this moment in time as his characters do, which is part of what makes it such a joy, like getting to relive all the anecdotes old friends might share with each other at their 10-year high school reunion.

The future could not have been brighter for everyone involved in American Graffiti, which launched too many hit TV shows and movies and acting careers to count. But Lucas’s head isn’t so clouded with sentimentality that he misses the futures that aren’t so bright, either, whether they’re cut tragically short or so disappointingly mundane that cruising Modesto in 1962 will always be remembered as the best of times. One of the best exchanges in the film is existential, with Curt desperate to catch a ride that he hopes will never end:

“Where are you going?”

“Nowhere.”

“Well, do you mind if I come along?”